The Relationship Between Worship and Culture in the Mission of the Church
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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WORSHIP AND CULTURE IN THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH Nicolae BRÎNZEA Abstract: What represents culture today for the changed and changing humanity, what ties does it have with the forms of worship and how can we explain the beautiful paradigm civilization-culture-spirituality- worship-divinity, knowing that any form of manifestation of deity worship generates worhip, which then transposes itself in spirituality, annihilating the forms without substance and becoming culture as foundation of any civilization? The axiom of the relationship between worship and culture remains forever, for the Christian, the Church, its mission being his own mission, in his postulated capacity as a citizen of the Kingdom of God, a traveler on this earth, to which he has a mission and a special call. True culture is not an end in itself, but is an integral part of the religious conception. It expresses a symbolic relation with heaven, as religion expresses a real relation to it, dialog. Denial of the Christian worship of the Church generates false culture, inculturation and trend, surrogates that end up capping and rebooting, in strategies forever destined to fail, because man found in conflict with God cannot generate culture, the conflictual attitude itself being the cause of this spiritual suicide. Keywords: culture, civilization, spirituality, divinity, Jesus Christ, God, Church, Holy Trinity, mission. What represents culture today for the changed and changing humanity, what ties does it have with the forms of worship and how can we explain the beautiful paradigm civilization-culture-spirituality- worship-divinity, knowing that any form of manifestation of deity worship generates worhip, which then transposes itself in spirituality, PhD, Professor at University of Piteşti (Department of Orthodox Theology), Romania; Director of Hurmuzachi Institute, Bucharest, Romania. 16th International Symposium on Science, Theology and Arts (ISSTA 2017) annihilating the forms without substance and becoming culture as foundation of any civilization? These are just a few questions we are called to answer in front of our peers, most of them living in a cultural and spiritual void, a false, multicultural, secular, global, induced, without form and essence and anti-human ideology, without anthropological horizon, deprived of truth and freedom. This is why until the miracle of Incarnation, followed by the Resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ we cannot talk about worship and culture except in its mysterious, veiled and symbolic form, without dismissing, of course, the importance of some human creations, as a result of overcoming its own condition: “Thus, the entire genuine human culture can become an intelligent and sensitive worship of the Creator of the Universe, and religious worship remains the original matrix and paradigm of culture. When worship bore fruit in culture, it was open to universality, and when the culture was inspired by worship, it was open to eternity.”1 But Jesus Christ brings a transfiguration in this respect as well, and makes it through the Church founded visibly at Pentecost, from which we can truly deduce the restorative power of the uncreated divine grace, in all that the Christian man would create and the simple man in partnership with him, on his journey from image of the Face (as icon of the Father) up until resemblance.It is needless to mention here the monumental art masterpieces of Christian culture as a direct result of this partnership, which some theologians have called it simply theandric, insisting only on this wonderful relationship between worship, culture and their role in the mission of the Church, an action that moved humanity through symbol, image, representation, justification and permanence, more then we can understand, precisely because behind this silent picture, sits and eternally speaks to us the Living Word of God. The Word had spoken to man since his creation, but man chose to remain silent, not hearing Him because of disobedience, except through revelation, thus his entire creation, after the Fall, cannot be considered an existential and essential culture, but only a prefigurative one, feature given also by the Word of God, Whose presence before time and that 1 Dan Ilie CIOBOTEA, Dăruire şi Dăinuire, Raze şi chipuri de lumină din istoria şi spiritualitatea românilor, Iaşi, Trinitas, 2005, p. 72. 176 ARS LITURGICA. From the Image of Glory to the images of the idols of Modernity transcends time, remains the only source of all reason to be and to create, as we see, with national pride, this happened with the “full expression of the Romanian soul”2. The church is the one that will create a new civilization, namely Christian civilization, based on the new Christian worship and resulting in the most prolific culture known to mankind since its creation. To better understand what is intended to be exposed it is better to define precisely worship, culture and the Church: 1. Worship means, after all, the act of worshiping and thanking the deity by means that belong exclusively to religiosity. 2. Culture has had many definitions over time with reference to the capability of man towards knowledge, belief, art, law, morals and habits he acquired as a member of society or rising above the natural condition through the development and exercise of his spiritual and moral powers3 (see the two-great theorist Edward Burnet Tylor and W. Lewis). 3. The Church is life of communion of the Holy Trinity extended in humanity and communion of love and life of humans with God through Christ in the Holy Spirit. If mankind today lives an endless drama at a social, political, aesthetic, educational and cultural level and in a civilization in decline, it is precisely because it didn’t remain anchored in the Church of the Word, only this time it refuses definitely and consciously the call of divine grace, with repercussions of the worst kind at a planetary level: ecological, moral, political and economic crises, resulting in a world full of hatred through violence, terrorism, wars and atrocities, one gloomier then the other, meaning the abyss of forms without substance, in which Western civilization (if we can still call it that) sinks more and more, and towards this civilization we run with ‘panting rush’4. 2 Constantin NOICA, Eminescu sau gânduri despre omul deplin al culturii româneşti, București, Humanitas, 1975, p. 20. 3 Burnett Edward TYLOR, Primitive Culture, London, 1871, apud Ferréol Juquois, Dictionary of Otherness and Intercultural Relations, rom. transl. by Nadia Farcaș, Iaşi, Polirom Ph., 2005, p. 181. 4 Dumitru STĂNILOAE, Reflecţii despre spiritualitatea poporului român, Bucureşti, Elion, 2001, p. 18. 177 16th International Symposium on Science, Theology and Arts (ISSTA 2017) The axiom of the relationship between worship and culture remains forever, for the Christian, the Church, its mission being his own mission, in his postulated capacity as a citizen of the Kingdom of God, a traveler on this earth, to which he has a mission and a special call. And this mission is fulfilled in the Church through culture, meaning his correct relating to values, as a result of active participation to the Christian worship. If we look objectively we observe that in human history only Christianity is the one who argues for an equitable relation between worship and culture through the Church, from an origin and genetic stand point, from a stand point of symbiosis of history, that of mutual influence, that of exclusivity (the conflict between religion and culture) and in terms of culture’s finality in conjunction with Revelation, having the convergence point in the Incarnate Word who speaks to us through Himself. And the word that we hear (faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ - Romans 10, 17) as well as the image (icon) that we see, are both sensible phenomena, to be perceived, they are addressed to the sensory organs, the word can be as sensitive as the intelligible image, this iconographic analogy is present throughout the history of salvation of mankind, since Creation and the Resurrection from the dead (and it will be present up to the Second Coming and eternity), history that has generated both the worship and the culture undertaken by the Church of God, one addressing hearing, the other sight, for says St. John of Damascus: “see the image… and we fall down and worship not the material but that which is imaged: just as we do not worship the material of which the Gospels are made, but that which these typify”5. In other words, it’s important to see and hear to the path traversed by the Church from worship to culture, as well as the path of the Church from the catacombs to icons and Christian artworks left to us as inheritance through the living treasure of Christian tradition: religious culture is faith, witnessing, experience, expression, exemplification, painting, music, history, apology etc., meaning theology as a whole6. True culture is not an end in itself, but is an integral part of the 5 ST. JOHN DAMASCENE, Exposé précis de la foi orthodoxe, IV, 16, P.G. 94, c. 1172. 6 Dumitru POPESCU, Teologie și Cultură, București, Institutul Biblic și de Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, 1993. 178 ARS LITURGICA. From the Image of Glory to the images of the idols of Modernity religious conception. It expresses a symbolic relation with heaven, as religion expresses a real relation to it, dialog. Between this symbol and this reality there isn’t an insurmountable distance since reality sheds light and understanding